Abstract
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A wormhole attack is one of the hardest problems to detect whereas it can be easily implanted in any
type of wireless ad hoc network. A wormhole attack can easily be launched by the attacker without
having knowledge of the network or compromising any legitimate nodes. Most existing solutions either
require special hardware devices or make strong assumptions in order to detect wormhole attacks
which limit the usability of these solutions. In this paper, we present a security enhancement to
dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol against wormhole attacks for ad hoc networks which relies on
calculation of round trip time (RTT). Our protocol secures DSR against a wormhole attack in ad hoc
networks for multirate transmissions. We also consider the processing and queuing delays of each
participating node in the calculation of RTTs between neighbors which to date has not been addressed
in the existing literature. This work provides two test cases that show that not taking multirate
transmission into consideration results in miss identifying a wormhole attack.